Netflix subscription costs set to rise

On Wednesday, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told investors that the video on-demand service is set to rise over the next few years.

The exact amount of the price hike is unknown, but is said to take place over the course of a decade. “We want to take it very slow,” Hastings said at the investor’s meeting. “Over the next decade I think we’ll be able to add more content and have more value and then price that appropriately.”

There’s going to be more of a push to “motivate people to move up to the two-stream and the high-def and the ultra-high-def”, according to Hastings at the investor’s meeting.

While this was referring to Netflix in the U.S., it’s only a matter of time it takes place in Australia. Including Australia, Netflix reportedly has over 65 million subscribers. That number is set to rise to over 69 million subscribers next quarter.

While it may seem unfair for Netflix to raise its prices, there’s no other video on demand contenders that can match Netflix’s amount of content for its price. ‘Competitors’ of video-on-demand services in Australia include Foxtel’s Go and Presto services, Fairfax Media’s Stan.

There’s also Quickflix, but it hasn’t been a serious contender for much of anything for quite a while now.

The overwhelming success of Netflix will see subscription prices rise over the next ten years, regardless of whether or not the Australian alternatives step up their game.

However, there is the chance that this could change. The slow but steady rollout of the National Broadband Network – and Netflix’s slow but steady stream of releasing new content into the Australian Netflix library – may solve both of these problems in a decade’s time.